Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 20:20:47 01/22/03
Go up one level in this thread
On January 22, 2003 at 05:51:41, Matt Taylor wrote: >On January 21, 2003 at 14:37:52, Dieter Buerssner wrote: > >>On January 21, 2003 at 12:08:08, Uri Blass wrote: >> >>>I finished the time of my evaluation of checking bounds. >>> >>>It is expensive to buy it and before deciding if to buy it I want to know about >>>the value of the alternatives. >>> >>>How many programmers use it? >> >>I don't, at the moment. When I have time, I will build a gcc version with >>bounds checking built in. For allocated memory, libary solutions may work very >>well. For "normal" array, to me it seems, that compiler support for bounds >>checking is best. Actually, I am puzzled, that compiler vendors don't do it. >>Over ten years ago, I worked with Fortran under VMS. The DEC Fortran compiler >>had a switch (VMS-language, if I recall correctly) /DEBUG=ALL, which included >>bounds checking. With "modern" C-compilers, it seems not easily available. No >>doubt, it might have very high costs at runtime. Many programmers won't care. >> >>Regrads. >>Dieter > >Why does it have to be done at runtime? Ada and Pascal can do some >bounds-checking at compile-time. I have heard that C# can -guarantee- that code >won't mess around with bad memory. I think the same techniques can be applied >toward C/C++, and I am also suprised that it is not very popular. Compile-time >bounds-checking comes as free as constant folding. > >It may require changing the build process, but I find that less annoying than >letting bugs go uncaught because I did not exercise a particular path in the >program. > >-Matt I don't see how you could catch the serious bugs at compile-time. C/C++ allows _serious_ aliasing, which would make it impossible for the compiler to figure out what was going on, and when you compile with separate source files, it further hides what is going on overall...
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